DICE’s forthcoming “not Heroes” Battlefield game, Battlefield 1943, will be delayed on PC until September, reportedly due to the complications of bringing it to the PC platform. Once it turns up it’ll be a downloadable game available for $15. The game will feature a simplified Battlefield 1942-style system, and revamps three of the original maps, Wake Island, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. There’s a trailer for Wake Island beneath the click.

Why is it harder to develop for the mother platform? And not just a bit harder, months harder, months they’ve already booked. You can’t have it both ways EA, you can’t come up with three new experimental ways to combat piracy (Fewer maps and a competetive price sound like a winning combo to me.) and then stagger your releases by months to force the over eager to buy the console versions.

It IS nice to see even the big companies are coming up with other methods than draconian DRM though.

Well, I really hope Frostbite won’t be such a mess to patch/play with as the BF2 engine was. Hopefully they are paving the way for a PC exclusive Battlefield 3 MMOFPS with total persistent war/giant maps/player numbers…

Battlefield 2 is one of my favourite games and also hamstrung by massive technical limitations. Mainly making it terrible to mod for, but as well as the poor support meaning the best way to play bf2 is mods, but mods have arbitry limitations. So, heres to more of the same on bf3? Gotta keep us locked into the expansions right boss?

Is it just me or does this seem like it offers less (in terms of content/gameplay) than 1942? It’ll be interesting to see how well 1943 does in terms of sales.. it’s not as if I’m privy to inside knowledge, but I suspect those who are really into some WW2 gaming like 1942 aren’t the targeted audience here. It feels more like halfway between that and TF2 (if I interpret the trailers correctly). Of course, this is all just conjecture.

24 player limit is weak. The island is big, even TF2 got 24 and those levels are tiny compared to BF levels. Also, I hope they will keep updating it, maybe a new level now and then… as long is it’s not released as a DLC! I don’t care how cheap the game is at first, I’m not falling for that one and end up paying double the price of a full game for a half one.

Don’t forget that, if we are lucky, we might get to pay per map on a DLC basis. Heck, I could spend 10 dollars more right now and get the complete BF2 collection. If I wanted the (imo) far superior 1942 complete (with free DC mod) that runs about 10 bucks total. I know these are old products, but, to be more than honest, they offer a significantly, again, in my opinion, better gaming experience than 1943 can even begin to offer.

Rechargable Health? Infinite Ammo? A whopping 3 classes? AWWW YEAH! I mean, HELLL NO! Maybe this will be great for “My Baby’s First FPS(R)(TM)” but nothing I’m looking forward to. EA Pushing it out on the PC after it comes out on the Consoles (which seems to be a pattern with DICE and EA products these days, if we can even get them to release it on the PC, that is) is really not a respectful thing. Even if it does try to call me back to the greatest map ever created with Wake Island, and even if I never play it, I’m disheartened that those on consoles get to see the next iteration of a game I’ve been playing since that first 1 map demo that me and my mates played to death when it came out some 7 years ago while I get to wait on the wings, even though my platform was the one it was developed on and the one that pushed their franchise to the moon. To the Moon, Alice!

Bah. I need more caffeine. Too much invective this morning. At least it’s Friday.

I was pissed off that they’re delaying the PC version, but then I remembered that it has 3 maps, 3 classes, 24 players, infinite ammo, and regenerating health. The “complications” for the PC version is probably a question of “how can we get people to pay for this shit?”

I’m interested in this whole thing EA is doing. BFheroes is a free Ad supported + pay for customization game, BF1943 is apparently going to be micropayments, and BF3 will probably be a typical commercial game.

True BF? Who gives a crap if its a *TRUE* anything, my interest is in terms of the money they are asking for and the quality of the product they provide.

In the medium scale squad shooter, with regenerating health and ammo? But also tanks, and planes? It seems awefully diluted, for example if they are going for a even balanced state to all combat encounters (the regenerating health means everyone starts every fight healthy and with ammo) then why include vehicles unless they dont offer an actual advantage?

But if they dont offer an advantage (for example if they make you die faster and have a recovery period on your health healing after disembarking). Then again they can be a tactical use without an outright advantage. But they wont do that. I’ll hop out my nearly dead tank with full health, I’ll drop out of my plane near a capture point.

See, in games where you offer absoloute advantages to vehicle users you need to offer absolute disadvantages. For example In many more realistic fps, disembarking from a fast moving vehicle wil kill you. Often disembarking from a damaged vehicle will injur you (if its on fire).

But, when a tank can be a extra health bar as in bf2, instead vehicles are team assets, teams have a plane and a tank, and jeeps and then you are moving away from the regenerating health model of recovered encounters to the teamwork and tactics model where injuries are meaningful Where a disadvantaged opponent can offer a meaningful effect by slightly injuring me.

For example, I would rather that in a game with vehicles than one of the classes offer a persistent healiing aura, to him this would be like the game is proposed now, but others would only heal near him. However, he will be underequipped to fight planes and tanks. Making a potential of counters, medic beats infantry, tank beats medic, combat infantry beats tank. the combat infantry having the advantage of enhanced mobility in jeeps and better use of cover and co-operation. Then the players are naturally coerced into combined arms.

Sure that a rough design, but in this game the focus is on moment to moment actions, including teamwork. Combat is resolved quickly and the winner is rapidly at full health. In R6V 1 stronger player with a weak team, can beat a stronger team (individual skill) by fragmenting them.

1942 sat very much on the team assets side of this, 1943 seems to be skirting the designs without perhaps properly understanding what this creates. The sniper you cant kill, the tank which serves to empower the stronger player without disadvantage, where if a weaker player takes the tank the team is disadvantaged.

I bet you can still steal enemy planes/tanks meaning they dont respawn allowing you to then maintain air superiority, maybe dice will have learned, but if they did why didn’t bf2 get a patch?

Best gameplay?
When you have unlocked equipment…. Like *grenades* and the resuscitation equipment for medics, c4 equivilent, scopes for snipers, .

Shit that was default in BF2.

And then a fully ranked player can have a fucking flying drone follow him, deploy turrets and set up a powered shield and detect players through walls. Set up squad apawn points anywhere (support as a squad leader) link to bf2142.gamestrafe.com
Yeah… Great gameplay.

You realise that they’ve not done this to force people’s hand into buying the console version or any other misguided “anti-piracy” type measures. It’s so people get into Battlefield Heroes.

All hardcore BF lovers would go straight for BF1943, leaving BFHeroes with the odds and casual gamers (who probably all have consoles anyway). This way, PC Gamers will be excited for BF1943 which will actually increase the number of people joining up for Heroes, insead of being detrimental to it.

Plus BFHeroes is semi-persistant/MMO like (in that you earn XP and build a character), so it all adds up to the fact that they now give themselves 3 months to get gamers involved in something that they will go back to because they have a character, where if BF1943 came out at the same time they never would and BFHeroes would die a crib death.

Oh, and DICE themselves said that BFHeroes would have to be the most popular game in the BF series to turn a profit, so that means the devs are on the same page as EA too.

Don’t misunderstand, I ain’t complaining, as BFHeroes will be good AND free, which is an equation I like. Just wanted to point out the reality of the situation…

You’re reading too much into it.
Also, BFheroes isn’t good currently, has lots of pay for features and looks to be being made very cheaply so I’d be surprised if it needed a huge playerbase to be profitable.

BF games made their NAME on the PC. Why isn’t it a priority to be made FOR the PC now?

This is going to suck like most games we get nowadays if they make it yet another crappy port from the 360. I own a 360 controller but am getting kind of sick of seeing the little colour control pad buttons on my menu’s.

How about making a game for the PC once in a while instead of just giving us scraps from the consoles. PC is ‘the’ system for FPS.

Piracy won’t even begin to end before they make something worth paying for.

Flying BF2 helicopters with the 360 pad is actually pretty liberating, of course, this game doesnt have them.

@Rep
I’m not suggesting you read the comments or even the newspost, but at least think through your posts. EA like cash paper, Console development is cheaper (faster) and probably gets better sales. Drop the sense of entitlement and dont shout too loud about first person or they’ll make it third person and introduce a cover system!

Eh, I’m all over this. The “this is not TRUE BF!” hubbub all comes across as fanboy bitching, to me.

I definitely think that it looks like there is $15 worth of fun in there. Plus, I’m really on a kick about downloadable games; both for the convenience, and more simplistic (but fun) nature they often carry (as I’m quite burnt out on more complex games these days).

The gapped release is a drag, but, oh well. I have plenty to do till September.

Anyone that believes PC versions take longer to release because of QA are believing sweet delicious lies. It takes at least a full month for a game to pass EXTERNAL certification for a console that the developer has no control over, so you could easily have the QA done for the PC version in that time, where there is no cert process.

And that wouldn’t do well to explain why PC versions are always full of performance issues anyways.

Q: Why are we releasing the PC version of Battlefield 1943 in September?

A: The PC is built around the core game and that development process takes a bit longer. We want to ensure a true PC experience and that includes additional features support and gameplay that are not utilized for the console. – Gordon Van Dyke, BF1943 Producer

It’s really sad that 1943 has even less depth than BF:Heroes – atleast heroes doesn’t have regen health and not every class has anti-tank measures.
Let that sink in. The Cartoony TF2-style Battlefield has more depth than their “sequel to 1942″.

argh stop bitching its not the next proper bf stop treating it like it is if you dont like the direction its going just stop reading about it and dont play it when its released bunch of little girls bitch way to much.

I can see Wake Island is in this game, which sort of marks this game as a Battlefield series game, psyk. People prefer their Battlefield games to be much larger, and seeing this downward trend is quite disappointing for some Battlefield veterans. Especially for those who played Battlefield 1942.

So then what is the “next proper BF?” Because right now there’s BF: Heroes, BF:1943, and BF: Bad Company 2. There’s 3 upcoming games that carry the name, and 0 games that are “real” Battlefield games. So maybe people aren’t going to be too thrilled with the situation at hand.

Am I one of the few who actually liked BF2142? Titan mode was a genuinely interesting game type.

Oh, and: They are simplifying BF1942? It had less features than BF2! How much more simplified does it get before we come full circle and get back to Quake Deathmatch? Or “press this button and the game will play itself”.

DMJ, I’ve with you on liking BF2142. It was the first Battlefield game I ever really played for real, as I had only played the demo for Battlefield 2 and the demo for Battlefield 2142. Titan Mode was exhilarating, definitely one of my favourite game modes of all time.

Titan mode was fun. But maps with no sense of existing as anything other than varying degrees of natural barriers and an upgrade system which even interfered with vehicle to vehicle combat.

Once you have the upgrades you feel like a king though. But before the newbies had fun toys too. Seemed like an anti second hand trade trick, something now with non refundable key’s being more standard shouldn’t crop up again.